election Posts

That man with the funny name is going to be President. And all I can think about is the pride I feel that we've finally made it to the White House. We? Well yes, I am about as white as they come. Put me on the beach for ten minutes and I'm burnt through. Blue eyes and blond hair, my boys would have no sign-up problems for the Aryan youth league. But that skin color masks a complicated family history and abstracted ethnicity. My father, like Barack's, had multiple families and my mother, like Barack's, had children with different fathers. I have paternal half-siblings I've never met and a maternal half-sibling who I've always simply called my brother. No one in my family shares my Irish last name, which is fine by me because my only real Irish heritage is the name of my father's father's father. My accent, my tastes and my cultural references are all pretty much generic American.

A few generations ago everyone in my family had clear ethnic identities. They lived in enclaves of people like them, went to churches full of people like them and worked the jobs their people worked. I never had any of that. In school I was always vaguely jealous of the kids who had strong roots and relationships that were familial. But I was always an outsider to those networks, always sitting at the lunch tables of other outsiders. As I grew older I became more adept at finding outsider communities and my identity remains largely self-chosen and self-created.

This is kind of complicated identity is increasingly common not only in the United States, but throughout the world. And even the complexities of the complicated swirl about when you think of the ever-increasing gender identities and the minority of families now made up of a mom, dad and 2.5 kids.

This election is a victory for merit over family. George W Bush was a lousy student who never would have even been accepted to Yale if his father and grandfather hadn't been prominent U.S. Senators. The Navy would never have given mediocre student John McCain a fighter jet if his father and grandfather hadn't been admirals (and they would have taken the keys away after he crashed one after another after another before that final crash over North Vietnam). Al Gore? Son and grandson of U.S. Senators. John Kerry? Not quite so golden, with a secret paternal Jewish ancestry so hushed up that even Kerry didn't know about it, but his mother was from the Forbes family and a rich aunt paid his way through school.

Bill Clinton is the only recent presidential politician I can think of with a truly complicated family life and like Barack and Michelle Obama he owes his education to scholarships received as the reward of hard work and merit. A revolution took place a generation ago when universities started opening up and accepting students based on grades and that revolution has swept into the White House, first with Bill Clinton and now even more dramatically with Barack Obama.

And me? Well, to be perfectly honest I'm still a bit jealous of those who belong somewhere. I remain vaguely embarrassed by my last name. I can be defensive that I didn't inherit my religious identity. I still have a deer-in-the-headlights moment of anxiety when someone casually inquires about my ancestry and I live in a town where you're a transient if you don't go back three generations. If you want to ask me about my family life, you'd better be ready to invest a couple of hours studying flow-charts. But come January I'll be able to look at the President of the United States and see someone who looks like me. And increasingly like us.

I expect to be live blogging tonight's debate between Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin. Join me on my Twitter feed 9pm Eastern. It looks like the Twitterverse will be congregating around #vpdebate (see update, below), so go there for your entertainment and you'll see my snarky commentary in the mix.

The NYTimes has a handly "What to Look For" guide for the debate. It looks to be quite fun indeed. Update: Twitter seems not be updating very quickly. CSPAN's debate Twitter pull seems much more reliable.

Tomorrow I will vote in my first primary election--the first where there's still been a choice that is. When there is a generational divide, is there a question where I'll stand? When there is a divide of peace and war, is there a question where I'll stand? When a candidate can inspire this kind of spontaneous viral web content is there a question where I'll stand? I just hope this guy lives up to the hype, at least enough to keep inspiring others.

Of course, what does it mean that I can barely place any of the video's celebrities except for Kareem?

The bullets and bombs have finally found their mark. It is no surprise to learn of yet another assasination attempt against Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. Details are still sketchy and conflicting but the only thing we really need to know is that this attempt was successful and that Bhutto is dead less than two weeks before Parliamentary elections that might well have brought her into power for the third time.

Pakistan is a country who's top government scientist exported atomic bomb-making across the world for decades. It still hosts Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan's Taliban are still more-or-less headquartered in its Western provinces. The standoff with India has spawned war after war over the decade, now nuclear-enabled should either country get so emboldened. Billions of dollars of United States money has left Washington for Islamabad since 9/11 and a popular politician can't even campaign there without deadly assassination attempts. Pakistan is one of the world's hot spots, a nexus of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, religious extremism. It is a very sad day today indeed.

• Brent Bill tackles the paradox of the Quaker pastor
  How does my role differ from the Presbyterian pastor next door -- and how, or can, the idea of Quaker pastor be reconciled with the Friendly testimony against hireling ministers?
  (tags: quaker quaker.ministry quaker.programmed)
• Social class Jeanne on Cool Whip and alterna-culture values among liberal Friends
  Some might say a selection of the values above are specifically Quaker or come out of our testimonies. But I bet if you show this list to a Unitarian or any other lefty, they'd agree with it as a list of things to disdain.
  (tags: quaker quaker.liberal quaker.witness)

Poor Cindy Sheehan, the famous anti-war mom who camped outside Bush's Crawford Texas home following the death of her son in Iraq. News comes today that she's all but resigned from the protest movement. She posted the following on her Daily Kos blog

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a "tool" of the Democratic Party... However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left", but "right and wrong."

The sad truth is that she was used. Much of the power and money in the anti-war movement comes from Democratic Party connections. Her tragic story, soccer mom looks and articulate idealism made her a natural poster girl for an anti-Bush movement that has never really been as anti-war as it's claimed.

Congressional Democrats had all the information they needed in 2002 to expose President Bush's outlandish claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they authorized his war of aggression anyway. More recently, Americans gave them a landslide vote of confidence in last November's elections but still they step back from insisting on an Iraq pull-out. The Nonviolence.org archives are full of denunciations of President Clinton's repeated missile attacks on places like the Sudan and Afghanistan; before reinventing himself as a earth-toned eco candidate, Al Gore positioned himself as the pro-war hawk of the Democratic Party.

Anti-war activists need to build alliances and real change will need to involve insiders of both major American political parties. But as long as the movement is fueled with political money it will be beholden to those interests and will ultimately defer to back-room Capital Hill deal-making.

I feel for Cindy. She's been on a publicity roller coaster these past few years. I hope she finds the rest she needs to re-ground herself. Defeating war is the work of a lifetime and it's the work of a movement. Sheehan's witness has touched people she'll never meet. It's made a difference. She's a woman of remarkable courage who's pointing out the puppet strings she's cutting as she steps off the stage. Hats off to you Cindy.

---

Nonviolence.org's fundraising campaign ends in a few hours. In four months we've raised $150 which doesn't even cover that period's server costs. This project celebrates its twelfth year this fall and accurately exposed the weapons of mass destruction hoaxes in real time as they were being thrust on a gullible Congress. Cindy signed off:

Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can't make you be that country unless you want it. It's up to you now.

Sometimes I really have to unite with that sentiment.

Well, here's something: QuakerQuaker made the "SPA 100" list, Snap.com's top 100 sites using their preview service (this is the hovering preview you see when you pass over a link). They say their list represents "some of the more interesting, notable and funky sites" using Snap Preview. Hmmm, now if only they told us whether they think fell under "interesting," "notable" or "funky." For those keeping track, QuakerQuaker now mashes together over a dozen Web 2.0 services to bring you the Quaker conversation.